Eva Longoria may be stepping down from the board of Time’s Up, but that doesn’t mean she has lost faith in the organization.
Time’s Up announced on Saturday that Longoria, Shonda Rhimes and Jurnee Smollett will exit the board to allow interim CEO Monifa Bandele to reenergize the organization following CEO and president Tina Tchen’s resignation after it was reported she gave counsel to embattled New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo during his sexual misconduct scandal. Former Time’s Up chairwoman Roberta Kaplan also resigned after advising Cuomo.
“It’s okay to make mistakes in the efforts to topple the patriarchy,” Longoria told me Monday afternoon while promoting Poderista’s second annual Latinas Make a Difference Summit (I’ll have more on that later). “Mistakes will be made. It doesn’t mean the efforts should stop. We have to continue. We’ve been under thousands of years of a patriarchal society. It’s not going to topple in the three years that Time’s Up has existed. We have so much more work to be done.”
Longoria said that she has made a “financial contribution” to make sure Time’s Up continues to “make workplaces safe for women everywhere.”
“I’m excited about the trajectory of Time’s Up,” she said. “We were always in service of our mission and setting up a structure and a space to end the imbalance of power. So I’m excited for the next generation to move that forward because it is important that the work continues.”
Board members Colleen DeCourcy, Raffi Freedman-Gurspan, Ashley Judd and Gabrielle Sulzberger are remaining in place to ease the transition for new leadership.
